May 11, 2007

THE TWILIGHT'S COLD GLARE

Geo-Engineering happens. By 1751, Ben Franklin had noted how the Founding Fathers had changed our as yet unfounded nation's balance of solar energy. "By clearing America of woods and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light" Franklin noted , they had literally altered the Earth's albedo.

Ten generations later , the first Earth Day led to America's Clean Air Act and a ten million ton a year drop US sulfur dioxide emissions. This, as inadvertently as in 1751, unexpectedly contributed to global warming by letting more light penetrate the atmosphere. The two satellite photos shown here demonstrate an important corollary --bouncing more sunlight back into space can cool the Earth.

Though alteration of the Earth's radiative equilibrium can happen by accident or design, those most viscerally opposed to geo-engineering often have designs of their own.The thoughtful Nature piece does much to correct naysaying by carbon traders and others with political agendas. It notes how radically the deposition of solar warmth can be altered by very small masses of aerosols. The equivalent of a few pound per capita of fine mist from the 1992 eruption of Mount Pinatubo scattered enough sunlight back into space to cool the planet more than CO2 build-up had warmed it in the previous decade . The cooling glare startled sunset watchers for a year. And fired the tempers of self-appointed ethicists who prefer societal intervention to dealing with climate change directly.

Experience teaches that a little mass can cast a lot of shade. A few tons of jet fuel can lay a sun-reflecting contrail from coast to coast. A chilling corollary dawned on Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen a decade ago, and now he has floated the notion of

aircraft delibeerately generate stratospheric sulfur aerosols to stop
global warming cold. "It was meant to startle the policymakers," says
Crutzen. "If they don't take action much more strongly than they have
in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this."

Dr. Crutzen's attempt to find a place at the table for unorthodox
ideas comes not a moment too soon. Intellectual daring doesn't figure
in Olympia Snowe or Al
Gore's attacks on those who insist the debate is not over, but Crutzen
is hardly alone. In the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson has pointed
to the folly of mistaking global warming for "a moral crusade
when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that
if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless."

The truth that sets the IPCC free may not be the one its political
managers want to hear - but that has not prevented the horde of authors
from leaving it out in plain sight .The new report's section on climate
sensitivity notes that "Clouds, which cover about
60% of the Earth’s surface, are responsible for up to two-thirds of the
planetary albedo, which is about 30%. An albedo decrease of only 1%,
bringing Earth’s albedo from 30% to 29%, would cause an increase in the
black-body radiative equilibrium temperature of about 1°C, a highly
significant value, roughly equivalent to the direct radiative effect of
a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration."

And a 1% increase
in albedo , say the same atmospheric computer models the global warming
worriers invoke , would lower the Earth's average temperature by about
as much as the IPCC predicts it will rise in the century to come .
Turning a few pounds of sulfur per capita
per year globally into cloud cover enhancing aerosols or condensation
nuclei could , quite conceivably accomplish that. In some decades,
major volcanic eruptions naturally inject far
more sulfur , so it is hardly a concept outside the bounds of the
natural history of climate . It be enough to arrest the melting of the
polar ice caps.
Such an aerosol arctic sunbonnet might cost roughly as much as the
power bill for running the Internet. Little wonder, then, that Mr. Gore
and his communitarian cohort are aghast. Such modest post-modern
proposals threaten to cut their fantasies of Deep Green societal
control -- and moral superiority -- down to economic size."

Crutzen's proposed solution has little to do with pollution. Smokestack
emissions in the lower atomosphere are too short lived to provide
economic leverage on fighting global warming. Engineered aersols put far
higher in the sky- in the lower stratosphere in fact , ar the focus of
his interest. He also notes that they can do a lot more good at high
latitudes , because slanting rays of sunlight interact with more
particles than the vertical rays of the tropical sun. The story of
this policy paradox began a decade before I first met Crutzen at a 'nuclear winter' conference in Sicliy in 1984.

Responding to the ’Energy Crisis.’ of the ’70’s the National
Academy of Science identified coal and conservation as bulwarks against
OPEC oil blackmail, but proposals to conserve fuel collided with a
democratic Congress anxious to reduce acid rain. In terms of energy
efficiency, draconian reductions in sulfur emissions- a legislative
move spearheaded by hearings held by freshman congressman Gore,
backfired badly . Rather than investing in more efficient combustion
technology; industry bought SO2 scrubbers instead. They literally put a
damper on combustion, and instead of climbing, average US power plant efficiency fell for a
decade despite advances in high temperature materials that made for more efficient jet
and car engines. Regulation also forced a massive shift from burning
electrical coal close to eastern mines to stripping and shipping
low-sulfur fuel from the prairies of Wyoming. Nonetheless, by 1990 the
Greens got they asked for - a solution to the problem of acid rain
purchased at a high cost in carbon dioxide.

Meanwhile science
was learning a lot about what it did not know. One fact of natural
history is that a relatively small mass can cast a great deal of shade.
Combusting just tons of jet fuel can transiently cast a mile wide sun
reflecting contrail from coast to coast. The absence of such clouds in
the days after 9-11 changed ground temperatures measurably, and the
fallout from that observation includes the idea that long lived clouds
generated far aloft might offset the warming effect of CO2 in the air.
Contrail water clouds dissipate in minutes, but sulfate motes can last
for months- hence the cooling from stratospheric volcanic eruptions
like Mount Pinatubo in 1993, or as Ben Franklin also notes Iceland’s
Mount Hekla in the 18th century .can lessen global temperatures for a
year or more. And just as a long lived mist of sulfur rich volcanic
droplets can palpably intercept the heat of the sun, so can one from
burning fossil fuel.

One reason the Kyoto treaty crashed and
burned was that economists who did the math discovered it could pare
scarcely a tenth of a degree off 21st century temperatures. That’s
where the Law of Unintended Consequences comes in. The last thing Earth
Day’s instigators had in mind in 1970 was warming the planet, but
being clueless to how much cooling ten million tons of sulfate
aerosol could cause ,
Clean Air Act advocates literally could not conceive that inventing
the EPA could have a negative environmental impact, let alone that
sulfur burned to no good effect could instead furnish shade
sufficient to slow the melting of polar ice . Yet they are hoist on
their own petard - it is now clear that curbing sulfur emissions
exacerbated the rise due to CO2.

Perhaps PBS should produce a NOVA episoe on the subject, cataloging
the ways that unbridled legislative zeal may lead to a frozen planet,
with New York Harbor left high and dry as sea levels recede. It would
make a great vehicle for the narrative skills of one of my Harvard
classmates, an unemployed politician from Tennessee. If agents in the
audience want to discuss my new script proposal, its working title,
copyright 2006, is The Day Before Yesterday.

"Natural history is evidently not your sport, but geochemical cycles are a part of it . and you would do well you ought to aquaint yourself at least with the orders of magnitude involved. in terms of time and space and mass, before venturing to dismiss Crutzen’s proposal as folly.Common wisdom is seldom predicated on pure ignorance."

I have no doubt that the solution provided by Dr. Crutzen is a plausible one. And I will be the first to admit I know only a small part of natural history.

But just because our best solution is to "polute" our atmosphere doesn't mean it's the right one. I was simply making commentary of the fact, that it seems that we are correcting problems with another problem. You can correct me on that and I invite you to. I am not trying to call anyone a fool, but short term fixes to a long term problem seem foolish. And maybe it's too late to fix the long term problem and short term fixes is all we have left.

I would love to have you guest post on the subject of global warming, as I cover sustainability on my blog frequently. Though many of my readers are most likely not scientists and so it would need to be in fairly easy to understand terms.

This line of reasoning presumes that CO2 is the cause of the recent warming. If it is not, or if it is only a small component of the warming, then something else is at work. How would this plan affect or be affected by that 'other' cause or causes? Any meaningful degree of uncertainty would make a lack of reversibility of these actions quite dangerous.

It seems from what you wrote that this action is self-terminating in that the effect is temporary (which is good). How certain is that, specifically with the materials in mind for use?

Lastly, although they are applied higher in the atmosphere, presumably the sulfur aerosols do sink eventually (hence the temporary nature of the effect). Do they then reach the ground as acid rain? If not, what becomes of them?

RESPONSE
You may wish to avail yourself of the further readings noted at the end of the article. The visit to your nearest science library will also enable you to locate and review an undergraduate text on the atmospheric sciences - which should take care of the rest of your query as well . Many find the infrared absorption spectrum of CO2 alone so interesting as to compel them to rethink matters.

My concern with geo-engineering away global warming is that, in our exuberance for the doom and gloom hyped by enviromental harbingers like Al Gore, that we might overdo it a bit. What if global warming turns out to be "not so bad," but we turn around and signficantly cool the atmosphere by iron-seeding the ocean for planktom blooms and carefully saran-wrapping our atmosphere in sulfur?

Increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is undoubtedly increasing climate warmth. However I suspect that an even greater affect on warmth is the baring of soil by increase in annual crop acreage, roads, buildings, grazing, and desertification. You may see an article that discusses this in more detail in http://charles_w.tripod.com/climate.html .
Sincerely, Charles Weber

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